Field
The present disclosure relates generally to space-based communication architecture and more specifically to providing redundancy and automatic failover capability to the uplink signals to a satellite.
Description of the Related Art
Typical space-based communication architecture relies on a ground station/Earth station uplinking a carrier to a particular spacecraft/satellite and a receive antenna on the satellite receiving the signal and then re-transmitting the signal using a transmit antenna. One or more receive sites (e.g., spacecraft or satellites) tune to the particular carrier frequency transmitted by the satellite to receive the signal.
Satellite or space-based communication is a natural medium for point to multi-point and unidirectional distribution of content. Satellite or space based communication may be used for this type of content, rather than fiber or other terrestrial facilities, in order to reduce terrestrial network congestion. However, satellite transmission is limited in its methods of correcting for any lost or damaged packets.
Forward error correction (FEC) is typically the sole method of improving resiliency used in satellite or space based communication. However, FEC may consume a significant amount of bandwidth on a continuous basis. FEC is also susceptible to complete outages.
An alternative method to FEC is Automatic Repeat-reQuest (ARQ). With ARQ, packets are only resent when the packets are damaged or are missing. In comparison to FEC, ARQ reduces the amount of bandwidth needed, but introduces delay to allow for the correction and reassembly of the damaged stream. Also, ARQ requires a backchannel from each receive site which is neither simple nor cost effective via satellite.
In the related art, a backup uplink chain may be established at the ground station/Earth station having the primary uplink chain uplinking the carrier to the spacecraft/satellite or at a different ground station/Earth station. However, the switchover from the primary uplink chain to the backup uplink chain is a manual process, and the primary uplink must be disabled in order to prevent radio frequency (RF) interference.